St Saviour & St Cross

St Saviour & St Cross Mission Chapel 1857-68

In August 1856 the Revd Charles Fuge Lowder, inspired by reading the life and writings of St Vincent de Paul, accepted the Rector's incitation to lead the mission at St George-in-the-East at the centre of the London Docks. Interestingly in the light of modern-day church planting, they corresponded at length over how much independence the Mission might have, Bryan King insisting courteously but firmly that church law required him, as Rector, to retain ultimate responsibility, with the clergy licensed as his assistant curates - a stance he was to maintain in all that followed. Lowder also discussed the situation with his parents, with whom he was very close.

Its first service was held at 49 The Highway on Ash Wednesday. He then rented a sailor’s house in Lower Well Alley. Later that year an iron chapel, dedicated to The Good Shepherd, was opened in Calvert Street [later known as Watts Street] in Wapping, with a house nearby. In the following year they rented the former Danish Church in Wellclose Square, which had been used by seafarers' missions but had lain empty for several years. It was named St Saviour and St Cross, an unusual dedication in England (though S. Croix and Santa Croce are common enough elsewhere in Europe). This reflected two new associations:

¶ the Society of the Holy Cross (SSC, from its Latin title), which Lowder and five others formed in 1855, dedicating themselves to lives of self-disciplined service to the poor and the extension of the Catholic faith. Membership required obedience to a rule of life: Lowder adopted the white rule, the strictest, requiring celibacy.

¶ the Community of the Holy Cross, newly-founded by Elizabeth Neale (sister of John Mason Neale) who brought her sisters to work at the mission in the same year. [In 2011 the Community moved from Rempstone Hall in Leicestershire, a large listed mansion built in 1792, to more modest purpose-built accommodation nearby in Costock - their website is here.]

The presence of the sisters, alongside one or more assistant clergy and layworkers, enabled the Mission to provide a wide range of activities and facilities alongside a very full programme of services: schools, a 'penitentiary' or refuge for prostitutes (started in Calvert Street in 1858, moving to Sutton the next year and to Hendon in 1860), St Stephen's Home (an industrial school for boys, which also moved from Calvert Street to Hendon), a hostel for homeless girls, night classes and parish clubs, an insurance scheme for dockers, coal for the poor and general poor relief. Over the next ten years, a club for working men and a boys' institute and club, with a drum-and-fife band, were established at Wellclose Square. Staff and activities moved between the various premises, but eventually the sisters settled in the Calvert Street house and the clergy at 44 Wellclose Square. Accounts from 1860 and 1863 give more detail of the work.

The mission pioneered high church practices (Lowder was possibly the first Anglican priest in London to wear eucharistic vestments), and attracted protests and attacks (on one occasion a dead cat was flung at him) – though these were mainly focused on the parish church itself: see the page on the Ritualism Riots. Lowder always sought to be loyal to the Church of England, and was distressed by the conversion of friends and colleagues to the Roman Catholic church. He was deeply affected when three of his curates (Wyndham, Shepcote and Akers) were received into the Roman Catholic Church on the same day - Akers having assured the congregation in his sermon the previous Sunday that the Church of England provided 'safety' and liberty! Lowder constantly pushed himself to the limit, and needed regular continental trips to recover from the stress of it all.

In Twenty-one Years in St. George's Mission Lowder wrote, in 1877:

Wellclose Square, in which our Mission House was situated, is a large open square forming the meeting point of the three parishes of St George's, St Mary's Whitechapel, and St John's Wapping... The poverty of the place was very great.... In the midst of scenes of sin and misery the children were brought up, the school of too many the streets, abounding in temptation, echoing with profane and disgusting language, and forming a very atmosphere of vice.... The parish had very few redeeming features; scarcely any residents of education and respectability to foster a better spirit.... The church had little influence; what wonder that when the rector attempted to throw a little life into the services and teach the doctrines of the Church faithfully, that he should meet with opposition.... The mischief which afterwards burst forth in the St George's riots had been already smouldering.... It was in the presence of such a population, and in the face of such difficulties without and trials within, that the St George's Mission was now making ground in its campaign against sin.
[Life in the clergy house and church was conducted on semi-monastic principles....]
The first bell for rising was rung at 6.30; we said Prime in the Oratory at 7; Matins was said at 7.30, followed by the celebration of the Holy Eucharist.* After breakfast, followed by Terce, the clergy and teachers went to their respective work -- some in school, some in the study or district. Sext was said at 12.45, immediately before dinner, when the household were again assembled.... After dinner, rest, letters, visiting or school work, as the case might be, and then tea at 5.30. After tea, choir practice, classes, reading or visiting again until Evensong at 8.00. After service the clergy were often engaged in classes, hearing confessions, or attending to special cases. Supper at 9.15, followed by Compline, when those who had finished their work retired to their rooms.

* at first the Eucharist was only celebrated on Thursdays and saints' days, because of scrupulous regard to the Prayer Book rubrics about the minimum number of communicants. The daily celebration began in 1866.

Lowder was joined by the Revd Alexander Heriot Mackonochie (1858-62) prior to his taking charge of St Alban Holborn. Of his time at the Mission, the Revd T. I. Ball later wrote:

It was during the advent of 1859, in the chapel in Wellclose Square, that I first saw Mr. Mackonochie. The chapel was as a place for English worship, so unique in appearance, and is so associated with the memory of Mr. Mackonochie's earlier labours in London, that it deserves a word or two of description. The building, which stood in the middle of an old-fashioned square, and which was in summer-time almost hidden by trees, had nothing worth describing so far as outward appearance went, but directly you entered it you felt that you were in a church which had originally been built under other than British inspiration. It had, in fact, been erected at the end of the seventeenth century by Danish settlers in London for their own use. There was a thoroughly foreign air about it. First, it had much greater height than we should ordinarily give to a building of the same area. Then the arrangements were very non-English. At the east end was a shallow apse, open to the church above, but screened off from it below by a wooden partition, in the midst of which rose up a lofty pseudo-classical reredos, containing in the centre a large and inferior painting of the Agony in the garden, flanked by Corinthian columns, and surmounted by a pediment.

In those days (1859) High Churchmen were nothing if not Gothic, and so in front of the pseudo-classical reredos the clergy of St. George's Mission had placed an altar with a medievally designed frontal, on the gradine stood Gothic candlesticks, a Gothic cross was fastened to the reredos behind, and a Gothic cross adorned (or disfigured) the pediment above ... Against the lateral walls on either side of the reredos was, on the right side a royal pew or box, and on the left side an elaborately carved pulpit with extensive staircase. Between the two erections the floor was paved with black and white marble, and in this space stood medievally designed choir stalls for men and boys. Iron gates divided this sanctuary from the body of the church, which was seated with open benches ... It was in this church at a week-day Advent service that I first saw Mr. Mackonochie, who at that time was barely known in London beyond a very narrow circle. I remember that the service was dreary; there were very few people present, but the sermon spoke to the heart; and in the following January or February I offered myself to Mr. Mackonochie as a lay-helper in his work.

I still remember, after the lapse of twenty years, as well as if it had taken place yesterday, my first interview with him in his own room in the Clergy House at Wellclose Square. The room was a back one, panelled with drab-painted wood; well-filled bookcases stood against the walls, on which hung some pictures (mostly of sacred subjects, with one or two views of ecclesiastical buildings; between the window and the door of a little dressing-room stood a prie-dieu table with books on it, and a small crucifix in a triptych over it; the general furniture of the room (there was no carpet) was of the plainest and severest description. ... At that my first interview I was struck by qualities which I learned afterwards to revere and appreciate more and more as years went by. I remember so well how, on my raising or asking some question with regard to the doctrine of Holy Orders, Mr. Mackonochie expended infinite pains in discussing the matter to the very bottom, how he rushed to a cupboard and hunted out notes of college lectures in order to unearth some valuable opinion; this kind of painstaking treatment of a question raised by an unimportant stranger impressed me very much, and I think I may say that then and there a friendship arose which only deepened and matured as years went on, and which I feel and know death has not broken, nor even interrupted, on either side.

[Commenting on his preparation of two teenagers for baptism, Ball adds]

On the eve of their baptism he insisted that the lads should undergo a thorough ablution (at that time he considered this as a part of a proper preparation for baptism), and a missionary student who was staying at the Clergy House was sent with the boys to a public bath with orders to see that the cleansing was perfect.

[E.A. Towle, ed Edward Francis Russell Alexander Heriot Mackonochie: A Memoir (London 1890), from Chapter IV, 1858-1862. See also Geoffrey Rowell The Vision Glorious (London 1991)]

Lowder, who died in 1880, is commemorated in the Church of England calendar on 9 September. Here and here are two unashamedly partisan portraits of him; here are details of Maria Trench's 1882 account Charles Lowder: A Biography.

Other priests

Among the colourful sequence of clergy who worked with Lowder and Mackonochie at the Mission (licensed as curates to the parish church) were

Henry Collins (1856-57): ordained from Oxford in 1854, he had worked at St Saviour Leeds, where there had been a spate of secessions to Rome - when Dr Pusey visited to preach the tension was too much for him and he collapsed in a faint. A contemporary at Wellclose Square described Collins:
His very peculiarities – and he had many – were attractive, for though with reference to dress he sometimes set at nought all conventional ideas, he did so with such simplicity that, even while tempted to laugh at him, you were drawn more closely to him. He regarded the so-called 'religious life' as indispensably necessary to satisfactory work among the neglected people of east London; but in the cultivation of that life he sought the aid of the masters of devotion in the Romish rather than in the English church, and his preaching and manner of life exhibited a similar tendency. Lowder's approach was very different!
Collins became a Roman Catholic in 1857, and in 1860 a Cistercian at the Abbey of Mount St Bernard, taking the name Father Austin OC. He wrote a history of the Cistercians and a collection of Cistercian legends, and edited various spiritual writings, including The Divine Cloud (the first modern version of The Cloud of Unknowing , in 1871) and translated various French Catholic works, including The Probable Validity of Anglican Orders Examined, with...suggestions on reunion. His hymn Jesu my Lord, my God my all, written in 1852 when he was still an Anglican, remains in various hymnals. He died in 1919.
Hubert de Burgh (1856-58): from a wealthy Irish family, baptized in a free church in Dublin and a student at Trinity College there; in 1856 he was briefly a chaplain attached to the Turkish contingent in the Crimean War. He was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1858 and was (re-)ordained; he went to the USA, where he built a church for Irish and Italian quarrymen in New Jersey. He died in Blackheath in 1901.
Joseph Abbot Temple (1857-58) - after King's College London, he served curacies in Cripplegate and Devenport, and after a brief time here 12 years as curate of St John Westminster, before becoming a workhouse chaplain in Holloway. Here he refused to pay a debt to one Frederick Hunnybun, whom he reported for acting as an unlicensed broker. He was also an examiner for the London Civil Service & University College Ltd (founded 1878) and an assistant examiner in Classics for London University.
Joseph Leycester Lyne (nine months in 1861) – the eccentric 'Father Ignatius' was a self-styled Benedictine monk. Ordained deacon on condition that he did not proceed to priesthood, and abstained from preaching for three years, he was given a monastic habit by Dr Pusey, but his father objected to him wearing it. So too did Lowder – so he left. He eventually established a community at Llanthony, and in later life was ordained priest by an Old Catholic episcopus vagans. You can read more about him here and here, in A.Calder-Marshall The Enthusiast: An Enquiry into the Life, Beliefs and Character of the Rev. Joseph Leycester Lyne alias Father Ignatius OSB (1962), and there is a chapter about him in Bernard Palmer Reverend Rebels (DLT 1993). [cartoon, right, from Vanity Fair 1887, plus images from 1864 and an 1870s carte-de-visite by Samuel Alexander Walker, from the National Portrait Gallery]
Henry Aston Walker (1860-64) - from Oriel College Oxford, an 'accomplished and refined musician' who here and then at St Alban's Holborn, where he organised the music, combined plainsong with popular hymnody. In 1873 he went to the new (now demolished) church of St Matthias, Earls Court, and in 1891 became vicar of Chattisham, Ipswich. He sold a Montagnana violin for £120 and was secretary of the British Pteridological Society - ferns!
James Percy Kane (1863-67), of Trinity College Oxford, came from Cowley as Lyne's replacement. He moved on to St Paul Brighton for a further 8 years, and then held no further posts, but continued a peripatetic ministry, based for a time at St Mary Magdalene, Bread Street in Oxford where he was described as a most hard-working and indefatigable man .... we used to say that he was made of cast iron, nothing fatigued him. He was a glamorous preacher, featuring in Mowbray's list of photographic portraits (price one shilling). He later moved to Bury Lodge, Gosport, collected stamps (in 1882 he sent Stamp News a puzzling specimen from Bhopal) and became something of an expert on the coronation service, advising the liturgist J. Wickham Legg on an 1890 monograph on the subject.
Thomas Barton Hill (1863-??) was the son of the staunchly Protestant incumbent of St Stephen Islington (who shared the same name, and published widely, including a November 5th sermon on the popish Gunpowder Plot); a graduate of Wadham College Oxford, he had been Second Master at Godolphin School, Hammersmith and joined SSC in 1863. Later he was, briefly, vicar of Stonesby in Leicestershire (the patron being James Alexander Wood, a former curate of St George-in-the-East), where he died in 1877 - leaving a legacy of £400 for the education of Basuto boys in the doctrine of the Church of England.
Edward Gifford Shapcote, born in Devenport and studied at Corpus Christi College Cambridge, was Chaplain to the Mission's House of Mercy in Hendon from 1862-64, when he went to work as a missionary in South Africa. During his absence, his wife Emily - who wrote children's hymns and songs - became a Roman Catholic, as did Shapcote on his return in 1868. He worked as a private tutor, and became sub-editor of The Tablet until 1883, dying three years later. One of his sons became a Roman Catholic priest, and another (who translated Aquinas' Summa Theologica) a Dominican friar.
Laughton Alison (1864-65), from Lancashire via Trinity College Cambridge, was ordained deacon by the Bishop of Jamaica and priest by the Bishop of Exeter, serving his first curacy in Paignton. From 1867 to his death in 1892 he was Chaplain of the Society of St Margaret in East Grinstead, succeeding their founder John Mason Neale. Initially distrusted for his extreme views, he became much-loved, and the sisters dedicated the third edition of Neale's Sermons on the Blessed Sacrament to him. He was a keen traveller, keeping journals (now at Lambeth Palace Library) of trips around Europe.
Frederick Bown (1865?), from King's College London, had been curate at St Philip Clerkenwell and was briefly associated with the mission here before his sudden conversion that year. He trained in Rome as an Oblate of St Charles (a society of secular priests promoted by Wiseman and Manning, with a London base in Bayswater - see below), and served in central London parishes until his death in the 1890s.
C. Willis ('assistant curate of Wellclose-square Mission' 1868) and W. Wilan (mid-1860s)
Francis Merrick Wyndham (1866-68), of Merton College Oxford, formerly curate of Kington in Herefordshire, was another who 'converted' overnight, and became the priest of St Charles Bayswater and rural dean. He wrote several books and pamphlets about Joan of Arc, a history of the Paris Sisters of Bon-Secours, a 'anti-masonic catechism of Freemasonry', a textbook on Latin and Greek and Wild Life on the Fjelds of Norway.
George Akers (1864-68) - whose family were early settlers in St Kitts and active in the abolition of slavery; his uncle Aretas Akers-Douglas later became Home Secretary and 1st Viscount Chilston. He was a student at Oriel College Oxford; before he came to the Mission he was F.G. Lee's curate at St Mary's Aberdeen, where 'advanced' services had been introduced (see here for details of a fellow-curate Thomas Dove's failure to become its incumbent). While at the Mission, he offered to provide £4,000 from his family wealth to build a new church in Wellclose Square. Instead, he became a Roman Catholic in 1868; ordained priest in 1870, he was President of St Edmund's College Ware (training priests) and a Canon of Westminster, finally returning to the East End in 1896 to lead the staff of St Mary & St Michael in Commercial Road until his death three years later. A History of St Mary & St Michael's Parish, published to celebrate their 150th anniversary, recalls his time there (p155 ff).
[ Joseph Redman, who had been a layworker at the Mission, also became a Roman Catholic priest; he was a Doctor of Divinity, and among his publications was an edition of Henri-Marie Bouden The Book of Perpetual Adoration: or, the Love of Jesus in the Most Holy Sacrament (1873). He became involved in soldiers' missions, and with the Rev the Lord Archibald Douglas compiled The Soldier's Companion to the Spiritual Exercises [of St Ignatius] (1878). ]
North Green-Armytage (1865-67) - of St John's College Cambridge, he served several curacies, and European chaplaincies, before becoming incumbent of St Aidan Boston in Lincolnshire from 1888-1905. He described himself as a pronounced High Churchman, but wrote serveral books and booklets espousing the 'via media', including Anglo-Catholicism the Safer Way; or, Four Reasons for not going over to Rome (1890), Reservation Lawful (1895) and Alike yet Unlike; or, the Roman and Anglican Eucharists or Masses Compared (1907). The Green-Armytage family has produced artists, writers and medics (giving their name to a kind of gynaecological clamp).
Henry von-der-Heyde Cowell (1868-9) - as a philosophy student at King's College London, he had edited an annotated edition of George Berkeley's 1733 text The Theory of Vision Vindicated & Explained. After curacies in Coventry and Stepney, he came to the Mission as London Diocesan Home Missioner for a year. He then served the new parish of St Paul Paddington until 1892, and Wilmington in Rochester diocese until 1905. In 1877 he spoke at the Church Congress about the certain stigma that came to attach to clergy who were supportive of the Charity Organisation Society.
Edward Williams - an Australian, ordained in 1848 by the Bishop of Newcastle, NSW to serve the missionary district (10,000 square miles) of Liverpool Plains, where three years later he built St Paul's Church, West Tamworth and stayed as incumbent until 1861. After three years at Holy Trinity Missionary College in Shrewsbury and a curacy in Birmingham, in 1869 he succeeded Cowell as Home Missioner, attached to St Saviour's and to St Stephen Spitalfields, and living in Victoria Park, Hackney.

Dispute and closure

When the Rector Bryan King tried to have a district assigned to this church for the Mission, the minister of St Paul Dock Street, Dan Greatorex (who was a firm Protestant), objected, and stirred up other local clergy, including Thomas Richardson at St Matthew Pell Street, to protest about the spread of 'Puseyism' in Stepney. The Bishop settled the dispute by having a district assigned to St Paul's in 1864. (It had not previously had parish boundaries because it was the 'Church for Seamen of the Port of London'). Since the Mission fell into this district, Greatorex closed it, and bought the building for £2,000, intending to convert it into a school. So all the Mission's activities transferred to Wapping.

By now the parish of St Peter London Dock had been created. The church was consecrated on 30 June 1866, with Lowder as its first Vicar. The following week the cholera epidemic broke out, and that Lowder's courageous ministry to the afflicted earned him the title of 'the Father', then simply 'Father' - the first use of this title, it's claimed, in the Church of England. But this, and other subsequent events such as the tragic death of Mackonochie in a Scottish blizzard, are not strictly part of our story. The parish has its own comprehensive website. The Rector runs an addictive daily blog about parish life.

There is one further oddity about this story. Throughout the 19th century, and almost to the end of the 20th, Wapping was a distinct and separate community, both geographically (it was only accessible via four canal bridges) and psychologically. And yet the Mission managed to straddle the divide.